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I come back again and again to a pithy section on parenthood in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. He reminds us that "the Son on whose birth alone everything seriously and ultimately depended has now become our Brother." The irreproducible gift of Christ must shape the way we think about procreation. The prayer of Hannah cannot be the prayer of the Christian woman because the child on whom our hope depends has already been born and has become our brother. The supposedly natural, desperate desire to bear a particular, promised child may be changed by our faith in the birth of a baby boy in an inauspicious manger in Bethlehem.

Through Christ's death and resurrection, we are adopted, made heirs of the promise. Our generation should refuse to answer the questions of technological timing and start asking about the dearth of Sunday school teachers for the children who are already ours through baptism, about the dearth of adoptive parents for children in this country who are supposedly too risky for us to accept into our homes. At what precise moment does the "emotional DNA" of a foster child become intermingled with our own?

What would you advise a Christian who is debating using a therapy developed from the "existing" stem-cell lines?

In this case, too, the most important set of questions are "upstream" from this question. How did we come to have incipient life stored in thousands of vats? How did we come to have "excess" embryos for research when we have so many "unwanted" children in need of our care, whether they are in our churches, our public schools, or the local homeless shelter?

I suspect that in five years, we will likely not even be informed that the therapy chosen for us was developed from embryonic stem-cell research. We may even enter a period when the courts will deem that parents are unfit unless we consent to have our children treated with therapies developed through embryonic research. I pray that this will not happen.

What's your take on the view that personhood doesn't begin until the embryo implants in the uterus? Would you, along with this position's proponents, advise a rape victim to take the morning-after pill?

Why is an accidental, unexpected pregnancy considered a disaster in dominant evangelical culture? How can we reconfigure our institutions—workplaces, schools, churches—in ways that make them truly hospitable to new human life? Is there on-campus housing for undergraduates with babies at Christian colleges?

I would not advise a rape victim to take the morning-after pill. But neither would I condemn her if she requested it. Given the shame she may expect, how can I be shocked? But our moral discernment regarding the systematic use of embryos for research should not be shaped by the pastoral response to a horrible rupture of God's intent for gracious human intimacy.

Dare I ask you if the belief that life begins at conception—and before implantation—should affect many Christian women on the pill?

You are right to say "dare," because this question pulls in a huge number of women and men who are currently using a technology that, as a backup plan, uses a method akin to the morning-after pill. We would need a much longer conversation to talk about the history behind the pill and the reasons why mainline and evangelical Protestants have so readily accepted it.

It is not merely a woman's uterus that has become hostile to implantation. The dominant culture in the United States is hostile to the interruption of children, particularly the children of unwed mothers and children with overt needs. As women have entered the workplace, the workplace did not change. Rather, evangelical women, like other women, have desperately tried to meet the demands of a grueling workweek. I tell my pro-choice friends that, while the President's hands may be "off our bodies," our employers have their hands all over our bodies. The law allows "reproductive freedom," but the economic culture asks women to time their children with increasing efficiency.

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July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7